We are asking that you all follow these simple posting rules, search before posting, use links and sources when possible, and excerpt as required. Please take a moment to read. We need your cooperation.

Only one of these topics will show up in a sidebar, posting to multiple topics will still only show one topic.

Activism/Chapters - Activism, protests, news and business of Free Republic Chapters. Freep this poll should be placed in vanity. General news stories about activism should be place in news. After action reports from Freeps are allowed here.

Announcements  Notifications of Activism events, FR business

Breaking News - Not every story is breaking news. Breaking news should be news that affects most of us. There are some exceptions. If there is a hot current event happening, check breaking news. Most likely, it's there already, please check first, then use our search function. (Explained below)

Editorial - Editorials are opinions. Some vanities, if well written and thought out can be considered editorial material.

Extended News - Extended news is for stories which have been posted previously and have updated or newer information.

Free Republic - This category is reserved for Free Republic business.

Front Page News - Front page is for stories which are not breaking news, but would be found on the front page of a newspaper.

These are just some of the topics that you may use two or more. Do not go out of your way to put in more topics just to try to get more views for your thread. Doing so makes the topics less usable for everyone. Also, do not list every state on your thread. It is unnecessary. Please limit the state topics to those states that the story pertains to.

Government - News and discussion of all branches of government, departments, agencies, law, policy, legislation, processes and judiciary.

Miscellaneous - Anything which doesn't fit into another category.

News/Current Events - News and discussion of current events.

Philosophy - Discussions of philosophy and ideology.

Political Humor/Cartoons - Funny stuff

Politics/Elections - Discussions of politics and elections.

Unclassified - Articles awaiting re-classification.

Any State or Country - Do not spam every single state or country, please use only those that pertain to your article.

Vanities and General Interest.

Your Opinion/Questions - All non-sourced non-news threads are posted here. This doesnt mean your one thought is a thread by itself. Lately, we have been seeing articles posted that should be comments made on the main article. Your comment/vanity article will be pulled or moved to General Interest. Vanities should be limited to the mission of Free Republic.

To avoid duplicate posts, please search before posting. The best method to search is to pick a key word or two from the title. If the article you are posting is, "Funny Video, This Land", start with 'Land' for the key word. If it is a hot topic, you might want to use two or more keywords, in this case, try 'Jib'. For an effective search, select 'match any words' and select 'order by post time'.

If you couldn't source the story, you didn't post it! We didn't have nice AdminMods that tried to TEACH the Newbeeees!!! If they didn't like what you posted, they sent you to Chat, where your head would explode and your eyeballs would fry!

Is it really so difficult to automate the search for those posters who can't be trusted to do it for themselves (similar to the way excerpting requirements are detected/enforced)? Or, at least, put a link to the Search function on the Post page?

Given all the improvements I've seen here over the years, this one seems like a no-brainer.

Why not pull them for awhile with a note showing why they were pulled.... After a person gets one pulled at least he/she will have a chance to read the note.... If there are no consequences to posting them then what is the incentive to cease and desist?

What I find most amusing are the duplicates where people append to the title "didn't find this". You can almost always garauntee that'll be like the 12th time that article has been posted, and at least half of those have a perfectly matching title all the up to the "didn't find this" tag.

We do that. There is a note section available to us when we pull articles. We usually link them with the url to the duplicate.

My bad...... I was referring but didn't so indicate to the 'Vanities' part of the Title, not the duplicates.... Sorry. Thus my suggestion to pull them and leave a note so the poster would know why it was pulled and thus be warned ... i.e. Vanity

I understand the desire to eliminate "duplicate" threads. The problem is, because we are so vigilant about it, it diminishes this sites utility as a source of breaking news.

Many people don't want to wade through thousands of comments to find the two or three posts with an update on a breaking issue. It would be different if the original poster had the ability to ammend (or append to) the lead article with new details.

But since we do not have that capability, it really makes it harder to use FR as a good source for breaking news.

Maybe add a graphic as the header on the Latest Posts page - a still from the 'Jib-Jab' video with a red circle and X superimposed on it, and a note beneath it saying 'This was posted 723 times this month - please DO NOT POST IT AGAIN!!!'

I love those. I think most people's idea of searching is scrolling down the main forum page. There was a time when FReepers were some of the best keyword searchers in the world (masters of the Google plain and all that we survey), we must return to those times.

LOL -- Grumpy Old Man! (from the days when SNL made you laugh instead of groan)

When I was a boy, we didn't have these automatic-shmiggledeeschmatic html tag closers. If you wrote in double-sized red italics, everybody wrote in double-sized red italics, and they'd yell at you and push you in the snow and steal your shoes.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.